Duncan Mackenzie.NET

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the […]

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I thought it was neat that I could right-click the main project (excluding all our client script and HTML) that runs behind on10.net, pick code metrics and see cool #s like "23,442 lines of code" :) […]

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great […]

I'm part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I've been thinking about mobile interfaces lately... so I'm trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface... one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 […]

The auto inclusion of all our CSS files has finally become too annoying. We'll still use the app_theme directory, as it is a handy way to store our stuff... but I'm really hoping to not set the theme, and to add the appropriate CSS for the situation (mobile vs desktop for example) while also […]

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very […]

Hey folks, I work as the dev lead for Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online and other sites. We build community sites for Microsoft using video, audio and text blogging and we build them using the latest .NET technologies. If you are into web development, if you have a passion for design and user experi […]

We (the dev team behind Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online, and others...)been doing scrum-ish development for a few sprints now, but we recently switched to using eScrum. This is a set of templates and tools for use with Team Foundation Server and it really rocks. There are few less-than-polished el […]

I haven't had to write a parser since university, but if I had to write one now I'd definitely be checking out Tommy Carlier's 10 part series showing how to write a parser for a demo programming language of his own creation. […]

A few people have emailed me or posted comments wondering how I grab the Xbox Info for the Twitter app and for my services. It is not from scraping and it is not from any publicly available source. I joined the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP), which is an official program designed to support […]

My twitter app uses a web service hosted on my site to get all the necessary Xbox Live info.... way more than the twitter app actually uses. This is a SOAP API, located here: […]

Great little post today, something that makes perfect sense but I've never heard it before...

One of my jobs over the past couple of weeks has been to build a javascript based 'toolbar' that could run across the top of on10.net and show folks headlines aggregated from a variety of Microsoft Community sites. So, along with a bunch of help from Adam and Erik, I managed to get it finished and d […]

I love Winnipeg, but it doesn't normally get all that many developer focused talks... so if you live there and you are interested in .NET based web development, you should really get down to this event. […]

This time we are shipping the latest update to Microsoft 10, fun stuff... and an example of exactly how far from normal our team can be.

I was browsing on www.xamlog.com and I found this tutorial on "Reflection using Visual Brush and Opacity Mask", which shows you how to produce this effect: with very little code/markup.   Hmm... now that I finally have Vista up and running, it might be worth giving it a try. […]

I even got to be the 'preview' image! Check this out to hear a bit more about our design and implementation of on10.net, and for some more info on our plans around on10.net going forward and for moving Channel 9 on to […]

Met with Dave Mitchell from the Xbox team today to talk about Microsoft Gamefest. If you are going, drop me a line... I'll be there with a camera along with one or two other folks from on10.net. […]

Customizing VSTS to work exactly how you or your company needs it to isn't an easy job, but this toolkit should make it easier! […]

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

Ok, so I'm fishing for comments... not compliments at least, but I'm still fishing... I've seen a fair bit of traffic to the install point but not a single email or blog comment about this app... go ahead fire away (and yes, I know that it doesn't do Atom feeds... yet). […]

I've been working (as part of a large team!) on the new platform for MSDN, which is up and running at http://msdn2.microsoft.com... and now you can see prototype versions of the MSDN home page ontop of that same platform. Check it out here [

This is the sort of thing that happens with large development teams, one team codes in 'fixes' that break someone else's work... I don't normally do this all by myself! I updated the Flairmaker to support Atom 0.3, then I updated my feeds to Atom 1.0 ... great. See the error, laugh at the coder... o […]

Landed in Vegas for the conference, talk is on Thursday.... I'll be talking about MSDN2.microsoft.com, but more specifically I'll be covering the use of the Virtual Page Provider feature in ASP.NET 2.0, so if that type of thing appeals to you, come by and check it out! […]

Blogs and blogging software seem to be everywhere these days, and RSS has been a top buzzword for quite some time, everyone and their dog wants to take advantage of this new trend and technology. The problem is, it isn't a simple process to create and maintain a valid RSS file. If you aren't willing […]

I only recently noticed that my blog software (.Text 0.95) had atom support built in, so I added a button to my main page, and then I noticed it was Atom 0.3. Since 0.3 was recently deprecated, I updated the Atom generating code to output 1.0 instead and voila; Much thanks to rakaz's great guide o […]

I was reading the dotnetjunkies.com newsletter and I spotted these podcasts, a series of them that I have never noticed before, even though they definitely the kind of content I'd be interested in hearing. Moving to .NET from VB6 and C++ Juval Lowy discusses the different perspectives that VB […]

Nick, from "The Coding Monkey" mentioned that he would like to see Atom support in the FlairMaker, so ... having no real reason not to, and having an extra 15 minutes after the kids went to sleep before I started cleaning up the house, I added it... Of course, I've just added this to my forked vers […]

Neil Enns of the MSBuild team has released the first of a series of posts about how MSBuild works within Visual Studio, how VS projects are used by MSBuild and basically everything you'd want to know about how the two systems interact. […]

Check it out here...

Back on the weblogs.asp.net site, I had posted an article on how to setup your application to work with the Application Updater from PAG, but that URL was having issues so I have reposted it up onto this site for anyone who might be looking around for it... http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma/ […]

In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that the MSDN feeds were failing to validate due to a MIME type that included parameters (charset in this case, like 'text/html ;charset=utf-8'), but I also posted a query about this issue into the listserv for FeedValidator.org. Sam mentioned it on his blog, […]

Now, to me, VB 2005 is the "future", and anything beyond that is really just coffee-break information to read briefly.... but I guess I wouldn't be a very good Microsoft person if I didn't start pushing the version-after-next version of our development tools before the next version has even shipped. […]

I've played around with coding against the Messenger APIs before, but it seems that MSN has really gone all out now and released a bunch of information for coding against their search, messenger, mapping services, and more... check it out on MSDN as of today! http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/ […]

This is an interesting idea ... http://www.exceptioncollection.com/, something that I've pondered before... […]

I've been messing around with using XSL to display RSS on MSDN, as a simpler alternative to a custom ASP.NET control, and while it works perfectly in the core case (display all the items in a feed in a format), there are two additional requirements that were very easy to handle in a .NET class, but […]

This should only be an issue if you've written code that checks for version=6, instead of version =>6, but that happens so you might want read the following blog entry about this new version.

Server Intellect, my web host and the folks that I called "the best hosting company I have ever worked with" have annouced that they now have ASP.NET Beta 2 hosting available... for free for anyone using one of their […]

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you probably know about my column "Coding4Fun", well now there is an entire site on MSDN going by that name... to be clear, this is not a site all about my column :) ... it is a site dedicated to the same concept though, hobbyist coding. Check it out at: ht […]

I ran into a problem recently, where duplicate IDs were being generated by my offline ADO.NET code... and I had no real idea why this was happening. I had set up the primary key of my DataTable to have the following propery values: […]

Scott Seely, a former MSDN co-worker of mine and now a member of the Indigo team, is working on a new Indigo book with Brian Nantz. The book won't be out for a while, but you can get a lot of advance information (including some of the chapters), by watching for updates on www.thatindigobook.com. Sho […]

Looks like I have a new place to hang out and answer questions...

Remembering User Information in Visual Basic .NET

I wrote a couple of articles on BITS in the past (creating a wrapper, then background copying, then digital grandma) but it was all about downloading files. Starting with BITS 1.5, you can also upload files... is that topic of interest to folks? Just FYI, you need web server support to make this wor […]

Currently I'm running .Text .94 + a bunch of private modifications and some version of CS:Forums + a bunch of private modifications... so now that CS 1.0's source is out, I want to incorporate my mods into the combined package and then migrate my data and get my site up and running on the new stuff. […]

On the various programming forums I read, a common question is "how can I find out the IP address of my router"... for whatever reason (and there certainly are a few reasons that I can think of) people were really looking for their IP address on the Internet. In general, the solution was to hit one […]

Aaron Brethorst has a little page of his code samples up at http://www.brethorsting.com/code/ which include a few interesting items including a software version of the Enigma machine in C#. Cool stuff. Aaron is also the author of iRooster, an alarm clock application (that uses playlists from iTunes) […]

Telligent Systems, the company founded by former Microsoftie (and ASP.NET whiz kid) Rob Howard, has finally released Community Server 1.0. Community Server combines the functionality of forums (based on the ASP.NET forums engine Rob worked on while at Microsoft), blogs (based on the […]

Quick sample (calling the GetShortPathName API) in VB.NET posted to http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Samples/

I bet I've mentioned these before, but the joy of rediscovery is the positive side of a poor memory... Christopher Frazier pointed to these in a email discussion today, and I thought you might be interested! […]

I've mentioned it before, but it is worth saying again. When I decided to build my site up from its static beginnings and add on various asp.net-driven

The Outlook Web Access team is looking for web developers […]

Thanks to a post by Nick Parker, I found out my blog site was not producing valid RSS... and now it is :) […]

An A-List of .NET consultants, including my friend Joel Semeniuk amongst others, are auctioning themselves off on EBay... with the proceeds going towards disaster relief in Indonesia. Check out the details (and the full list of folks)

Google and various blog software vendors recently announced a method to deter comment spam by reducing its benefit to the spammer... it sounds like a pretty good idea, so I updated my installation of .Text to use this new attribute in the comment section by adding just a single line within comments. […]

The recent annoucements around Visual Fox Pro 9.0 have brought up a bunch of memories, and have me tempted to install VFP for the first time in years... Whether or not you have a chance to give VFP 9 a try, if you are planning on getting into .NET or VB .NET specifically and have a FoxPro backg […]

The demo is online, building up images dynamically and serving them up to you in a few seconds (depending on connection speed I assume)... but the code and the accompanying explanation is top-notch, so if you are interested in GDI+ info, check this out!! […]

I like that Bungie is exposing your stats as RSS (see mine here), but it would be cooler if they had added some additional elements and attributes to the feed to describe the games in a more usable format, rather than just in HTML... instead of; <item> <title& […]

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/express/ for full details, but here is a quick list of the winners: […]

Recently I transitioned the C# Content Strategist role over to Frank Redmond, but that was only the first of several changes for me at MSDN. Today, my boss made the rest of the changes public, so now I can talk about it :) I'm going to be leaving the Content Strategy team completely and joining t […]

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had written a new system for producing MSDN's RSS feeds, and those feeds are now live at the same URLs as the previous versions. You might get some duplicates in your aggregators, (since these are new feeds but with some overlap of items from the old feeds) but […]

I'm working on the bootstrapper chapter for my upcoming ClickOnce book and it occured to me that a lot of people probably haven't heard about the bootstrapper for Visual Studio .NET 2003... […]

... and it is almost ready to ship.... […]

I took Scott Watermasysk's 'book control' and modified it recently to display more than one book (moving it to VB.NET along the way), and I reduced the file it pulls from down to just a list of ISBN #s.... but then I wasn't able to display the title of the book as a tooltip (like the original does). […]

My Advanced Basics column from the October 2004 issue is now up online... Building a Progress Bar that Doesn't Progress and if you think that title is odd, here is what Chris Sells had to say when he first heard it... (comments used 100% without permission, but I figure he won't mind)... "I can’ […]

Juanito27 posted this question to the VB.NET forum on GotDotNet last week... […]

I was reading an entry from David Kean about some inconsistencies in 2.0 Framework classes, and I decided to jump up a level and read through some of his others posts... holy code samples, Batman! Seriously, almost every post includes a code or XML sample of some sort... that is a high signal-to-noi […]

I can't find any other landing page for this, so check out the blog entry from Georgeo Pulikkathara for all the details... Soup to Nuts – A Webcast Series for Windows Forms DevelopmentTune in and learn how to build Windows Forms applications and smart clients in .NET. We’ll take you through all […]

Anytime people talk about developing shareware with .NET, the discussion centers around the download/install of the Framework, because that is the issue that seems like the biggest hurdle to non-corporate developers... I could go on and on about the various methods of getting the Framework installed […]

I created a Pocket PC remote for Windows Media Player, but I only had speakers right next to the music system... so the remote wasn't all that useful... but I just picked up this wireless speaker; and suddenly it is time to install that software again ... my wife now puts the speaker wherever s […]

With the recent annoucements, I get to check something off of my personal wishlist.... Avalon (and some connected systems thing... "purple" I think it's called...) will be available on WinXP!! […]

Rotating Is Fun Duncan Mackenzie […]

On my home dev box I couldn't seem to open any of my projects (VB or C#), and whenever I tried I got this useful error; […]

This article, by John Kennedy, discusses the creation of an image editing application completely built with C# Express Edition. […]

Defining and Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005 […]

In case you didn't notice this on the /vbasic home page... […]

Building Tools Using the Visual Studio Automation Model […]

What's New in Help for Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1 Find out about the newest Help features in Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1, including distinguishing Visual Basic from other languages, more task-oriented topics, and an emphasis on code examples. […]

Matthew Gertz, Dev Lead for the VB Compiler, Editor & Debugger team has written an article on operator overloading in Visual Basic 2005... […]

This new article from Ken Getz provides an overview of many of the new features in Visual Basic 2005, including "My", "Edit and Continue", "AutoCorrect", "Just My Code" and more... […]

And (hopefully the formatting will work out ok in the blog) here are the results :) […]

If you follow other people's blogs, then you've probably heard about the Power Pack by now, but I'm happy to annouce that the overview article (complete with pictures!!) is available on MSDN! […]

As with my earlier messing around with a poll, I took a concept from the www.asp.net site today and made my own "CheckDotNet.aspx" page. The one on www.asp.net only checks for the .NET Framework 1.0 or better, so I modified the logic to detect 1.1 and 1.0 as two distinct cases... recommending an upg […]

Check out this link to go right to the VB section... lots of great info in there... or check out the C# section here. (found via the VSTO2 blog...) Note that this is not a prototype of the next version of MSDN... it is intended to be consumed by the internal browser in Visual Studio... so the non-IE […]

The 3 Leaf guys, (well probably just one of them... but who knows which one), talk about "Application Level Events" in Whidbey […]

I get this question a lot, and I explain many of the same things that Paul goes through in this post, so I'd love it if more people would read this material: […]

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I wouldn't have known about this site, if the site's owner wasn't sitting behind me on the plane to TechEd, so I thought the rest of you might not know about it either :) TryIIS.com is a new site dedicated to resources for evaluating IIS, and contains over 100 whitepapers and other materials... No […]

Steve Steiner, a developer on the VS debugger team, fills us in on some of the differences between the different types of debugging that VS is capable of... […]

Those wild and crazy PAG guys are at it again... […]

Check out the full post for info on Eric's talk in particular... […]

Snippets are a pretty cool feature of VS 2005.... aka Intellitasks to some... and Gus has created a tool to make them... (well, he did back in March.... :)) […]

I answer quite a few questions on the forums on GotDotNet, and sometimes those answers are interesting enough (in my opinion) to be exposed to a larger audience.... Coding this particular one caused Brian Johnson to say... "cool", so it seems worth posting about here :) The question was (paraphrased […]

Something must have changed, but I had no idea what it was... but suddenly, existing applications (the same version of which run fine on other machines) were crashing with IO errors, specifically "System.IO.IOException: The device is not ready.".   At the same time, I could no longer […]

Back in highschool, I cut lawns for a lot of people.... so many that it was really a summer job and kept me quite busy, and then in University I took a job laying sod for a landscape company.... kinda went from the amateur level to the professional there. Both jobs were hot, dirty and left me ready […]

Paul Vick (Technical Lead on the VB team and author of this book) provides a list of key VB sessions scheduled for the upcoming TechEd conference... and his schedule for the week. TechEd 2004 sessions (from Panopticon Central) I'll be there too... and I'll post my sched […]

Part of vbCity's newsletter, the 'diary' column always has some great content focused on how-to information for people who are ramping up on VB.NET... the latest post talks about the concept of an Owned Form, and it is pretty useful stuff... […]

Watch Mike Schinkel interview Joe Binder (PM of VB's My feature) about VB 2005's "My" Classes. Not into video, check out my article on the same topic. […]

Amazing stuff... Adam Nathan creates pinvoke.net, to general acclaim, and then follows only a few days later with a great VS.NET Add-In that allows you to search for, insert and even contribute PInvoke signatures to his site. […]

Joe Mayo posted a great 'frequently asked question' along with a very clear answer, to the C# FAQ recently.... Why did I receive the error: "The type or namespace '<namespace name>' does not exist in the class or namespace '<parent namespace>' (are you missing an assembly reference?)" I […]

From Dan's blog: […]

Very cool article from Code Project; this is something I have wanted for awhile..... from the moment we started outputing RSS from MSDN, it seemed to me that you'd want to view them inside of VS... I'm downloading this right to try it out, but the article is well written and covers a lot of good top […]

Two video interviews with Eric Gunnerson appeared on Channel 9 today: […]

We just launched a series of videos about VB.NET onto the Visual Basic Developer Center, check them out! […]

From Paschal's blog... […]

This very recent article from CodeProject.com shows a Windows Forms control (C#) that allows you to browse AD objects... I have some issues with the implemenation (mainly: why use a User Control... why not just inherit from TreeView?), but the idea is great and well... it works, so why not take a lo […]

If you have any opinions on this topic, make sure you click on the link below and comment through Eric's blog... […]

It is all about "My", a feature of Visual Basic 2005... and I think it is fairly interesting stuff :)

Check out this post from 'The Wayward WebLog'... it is a good discussion starter for anyone who wants to chat about ORM (object-relational mapping) ... […]

I had read this in the 'offline' version of MSDN magazine (you know, that one that uses paper and is hard to copy and paste from?), but I hadn't noticed it was available online until now: […]

Adam Nathan has created a home for a ton of PInvoke signatures, organized by Module/DLL and pre-populated (by the man himself) with a ton of the most common signatures... I'll let the site describe itself with this text from the "What is this site?" page; PINVO […]

Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats for a full listing of upcoming chats, but here are a couple of VB ones that you might be interested in... […]

With code samples and screenshots based on the recent Community drop of Whidbey (VS 2005), Scott explains how to create your first debugger visualizer: […]

via Kent Sharkey's Blog […]

I've done this myself, including using a C++ shim to authenticode sign my add-in to get around

Waltham 4/14 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver) New York 4/15 (Steven Lees and Amanda Silver) Louisville 4/20 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick) Chicago 4/21 (Jay Schmelzer and Paul Vick) Philadelphia 4/21 (Sean Draine and Joe Binder) Denver 4/26 (Robert Green and Jay Roxe) St Louis 4/26 (Paul Yuknew […]

If you are using the CTP (Community Technical Preview) or you are just interested in Whidbey/VS2005, then you'll definitely want to check out the new blog created to allow various team members to post info on VS2005. Check it out here. […]

I have to admit that I haven't developed a "wizard" framework yet in .NET, I've just been stacking panels on top of each other, naming them step1...stepN and then showing and hiding them as necessary. Not exactly an easy-to-reuse approach, but it works. Justin Rogers, a developer who has worked on t […]

This is so very cool... a great idea, good explanations, tons of useful bits of code and information, and even a very graphically pleasing set of diagrams in the article!! […]

Make sure you check out your University/College bookstore! "vbjay" mentioned today (on GotDotNet) that he bought the Academic version of VS.NET 2003 from his college bookstore for just a bit over $100.00. I did some googling around and found several University bookstores offering the software for ar […]

If you haven't read much about Refactoring before, I'd suggest you check out Jay's earlier post on the subject, but he is now going into quite a bit more detail. […]

I didn't know this existed... so I'm going to assume that a few of you don't know about it either... there is a Blog site for MVPs at http://www.msmvps.com/, with some blogs hosted on that site (using .Text) and links to MVP blogs on other sites. […]

Hey folks, I've been working with the C# Team and two great C# MVPs (Jon Skeet and Nicholas Paldino) to put together a 'live' C# FAQ. This FAQ is being run as a blog, hosted at http://blogs.msdn.com/csharpfaq and is displayed on the C# Developer Center on MSDN (at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/t […]

Visit his blog and offer some feedback if you want to influence his presentation... […]

I've been thinking a bit about Generics lately, with the growing conclusion that I will mostly use the ones that ship in the 2.0 version of the .NET Framework, but wrapping my head around a few situations where I could see myself defining Generic classes of my own. With all of these Generics […]

If you follow Eric's blog (and if you are into C#, you should) then you'll have already seen these... but if you haven't then let these three posts be just a taste of what is available over there; Who does Microsoft talk to when they have questions? ... The feedback we got around E&C has been fair […]

Over in the Office side of the world, a set of 6 labs have been released, focused on learning how to use VB.NET and C# to create Office solutions with Office 2003 and Visual Studio Tools for Office... cool stuff if Office development is your thing (and it certainly is mine)... Visual Studio Tools […]

CodeSmith 2.5 is available, and although I've mentioned it in a few articles on MSDN already, I have to tell you again... I use this utility all the time. […]

From Dave Wanta, the guy behind kbalertz.com, a detailed FAQ for the SMTP mail classes in the .NET Framework. If you are using System.Web.Mail, then you'll want to check it out: http://www.systemwebmail.net/ […]

I'm just playing around with an internal application, just a tool that hits our internal web services for article ratings (you know, the little box that says "7 out of 9" next to MSDN articles...) and displays the results in a grid. Well, there are a lot of things I've been hoping to add to the […]

Ok... so I'm biased here, Pedro used to be my grand-boss at MSDN, and now works on some very cool and very graphical magic as part of the Whitehorse team... but on the side it appears he has been developing some Windows Forms controls, so I would suggest you check them out; This ControlLibrary con […]

Turns out we (MSDN) are looking for a few good testers to come and work with us in Redmond... if you are interested in a position, and the following job description (which you may have also seen on Laura or Kent's blog...) is appealing, let us know via this link. Are you ready to join an exciting t […]

Min Kwan Park, who works in QA on the C# team (responsible for debugger features) has compiled an amazing document for troubleshooting debugging issues in Visual Studio 2002 and 2003 ... check it out here […]

Gus Perez has posted the binary and source for a little utlity he has dubbed "ezClip"; Back in the 7.0 days I wrote a little tool called ezClip. It's sole purpose was to allow me to copy/paste files from one command prompt window to another. Our test tree can get pretty deep directory-wise and hav […]

Matt provides us with some insights into the world of language design, a field that most of us have only dabbled in via a university course, with his discussion of keywords, operators and the problems with extending an existing programming language after its original release. It amazes me how […]

Brian Randell has written 4 (really 7, but 3 of them are just the same article as both VB and C#) articles on using MSDE in your applications... (via Kent Sharkey's blog); Using MSDE? A whole whack of articles from Brian Randell on working with MSDE in your Web applications […]

Click here to see the first post, which is a request for some questions!!

Someone recently asked me for our template, style guidelines and other details about writing for MSDN. I wanted to find the public page about this, so I dug around for what seemed like ages and couldn't find anything even though I knew this was up on MSDN somewhere. […]

In a recent post to his blog, Paul Vick discusses the new IsNot Operator (and the history/rational behind the Is operator), which allows you to write;

Dan Fernandez presents how Visual C# “Whidbey” will include several IDE enhancements including a first-class code editor with rich editing features, a powerful debugger, and drag-and-drop visual designers. Click here to check it out in this recent installment of MSDN TV!   […]

This bit of news is getting quite a bit of airplay, so you've likely heard already, but the ASP.NET Resource Kit is now available... full of tons of code, videos, free book chapters, white papers, controls, and more... how can you miss it? Click here for more information! […]

This is so cool, even if you might take it as mostly marketing (sorry in advance)... […]

Provides a great introduction to creating your own custom columns and column styles.... including a drop-down column style, which is a very popular custom column for most folks!! DataGrid Zen Novice by Alastair Stell This project provides a 101 tour of the Windows Forms DataGrid Control, with emph […]

My simple class: […]

Joel Semeniuk, (my former roommate, co-founder of my first software development company, and now a co-founder of Imaginets), is doing a security webcast for MSDN... something about 'threat modeling' or 'model threatening', I'm really not sure which, but I'm sure it will be entertaining either way. […]

Debugging Visual Basic .NET Applications Join members of the Visual Basic .NET and Debugging teams to discuss debugging Visual Basic .NET applications with the Visual Studio .NET Debugger. Almost every program will need to be debugged sometime, so take this opportunity to learn more about […]

Getting Started with ObjectSpaces by Jan Tielens ObjectSpaces is one of the exciting features coming in the new version of .NET Framework, codename "Whidbey". This article will explain what ObjectSpaces are and will provide a step-by-step guide to a first experience with ObjectSpaces. […]

I'm a bit reluctant to post this, and I'm sorry in advance to all of your friends, but you should think about your own best interest here (you could win a Tablet PC!!). […]

Get all the details on the 3.0 beta of the JLCA here including information on how to join the beta program.

What is a Smart Client anyway? […]

A version of this code appeared recently on MSDN Belux, and it was so cool I asked Ianier Munoz if he'd mind turning it into a column for my Coding 4 Fun series.... lucky for me, he said yes and here we areYou have got to check this one out... […]

From KC Lemson's blog... ASP.Net samples of WebDAV against Exchange 2003 […]

I blogged about it before, but there is a 15-part webcast series starting Tuesday February 3rd, presented by Dr. Joe Hummel, focused on Visual Basic .NET topics for the Visual Basic 6.0 developer (and others!). […]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/win32map.asp […]

A new .NET Rocks! has been posted: http://msdn.microsoft.com/dotnetrocks/ […]

A series of 15 webcasts & lab exercises for the VB6 programmer... (see the full list here) […]

I posted a walkthrough of using the Updater Application Block onto my blog back in the summer but Zac Hamilton has made some changes/improvements.... I took the Duncan Mackenzie Blog located at: http://weblogs.asp.net/duncanma/story/10221.aspx, reworked it and added some things I was having a probl […]

I just saw this in a recent MSDN flash and thought it was worth mentioning... Get a Free Xbox with Every Deep Training Class ASP.NET w/ Visual Basic, January 19 - 23, Seattle, WA Visual Basic .NET, January 26 - 31, Seattle, WA Deep Training offers intensive, expert-taught, 5-day, hands-on classe […]

Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) API […]

I hadn't noticed that the graphic classes in .NET had built-in support for animated gifs, but a recent GDN post shows how you can grab the individual frames out of a GIF and display them one at a time... I think you would have to find out the intended delay between frames to produce the author's des […]

I'm getting back into my column writing, and I'm looking for topic suggestions... I actually have a long list of ideas already, but I'm always interested in hearing what you folks want to read about! So... suggest away! Feel free to include topics related to the Media Center edition of Windows XP as […]

The latest 'issue' of my Coding 4 Fun column has been published to MSDN; Duncan Mackenzie describes how to control a serial-port–connected LCD panel using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual C# .NET. It is probably worth mentioning that I have hidden a CRC16 class in the code download […]

Fabrice just sent me a note about http://SharpToolbox.com a huge directory of .NET tools and resources ... pretty cool site that I hadn't noticed before. […]

I'm a big FxCop fan, so I'm pretty happy to see this episode.... Code Correctness with FxCop Michael Murray and Jeffrey Van Gogh from the CLR Team describe FxCop, the freely-available code analysis tool from Microsoft. […]

Check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/vcsharp/using/books/default.aspx for a small selection of books that I've found useful... and I'm always looking for suggestions!

If you think we are talking about Whidbey too much... don't read this post :) […]

I've received a few emails and blog comments wondering how to submit comments on the MSDN C# Developer Center, suggestions for new comments, etc. so I thought I would quickly mention that anyone who has any comment at all about the site should feel free to email me. There is also a Contact Us link o […]

I was playing with the SHAutoComplete API call and the IAutoComplete (2) interface last night (adding auto-complete to an application of mine) and I found a neat article and related component on CodeProject... C# does Shell, Part 4 by Arik PoznanskiThis article is about the AutoComplete features pr […]

Anson Horton gave me this cool .NET component and source code last night so I've uploaded it to microsoft.com for your burning fun […]

Labs, Labs, get your labs here... […]

I was just browsing the chats page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats (boy, if ever a page was in need of an RSS feed, this would be it) and I noticed some really cool upcoming chats; […]

If you haven't checked it out yet, you should.. people are starting to post questions, file bugs and even get answers

Jan Gray talks about the update to the CLR Profiler We've just updated the CLRProfiler distribution. Once again, we're shipping both the source and the prebuilt binaries, and this time we're delighted to include a terrific ~100 page tutorial and reference manual written by the tool's author, Peter […]

Cory Smith posted about an upcoming session at the Fort Worth .NET Users Group, G. Andrew Duthie talking about ASP.NET (November 18th)... this sounds to me like a PDC-quality session, for free and with a lot more time for audience interaction.If you are in that part of the country, and you are inter […]

Ron Krauter posted this comment to one of my earlier posts; re: Reading Blogs... 11/2/2003 9:59 AM Ron Krauter […]

Logging Application Block […]

Erica doesn't have a blog, so I'm just trying to be helpful... […]

I had some drinks with Carl Franklin and Mark Dunn at the PDC and discovered that we are all audio freaks... and while our conversation was focused mostly on mixing boards and real-time noise filtering... we did talk a bit about their .NET "radio" show which is now available on MSDN! […]

I've been catching up on a few blogs, now that I've finally managed to get connected :) ... […]

View in on the vbasic Developer Center...

Robert posted some good info about the new changes in GotDotNet Workspaces, and it was compelling enough that I went out and added aliases for my various workspaces!Visual Studio .NET Bootstrapper Plug-In is now http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/vsBootMy Music System is now http://workspaces.gotdotnet […]

Darren Neimke, Mr. RegEx himself, has written a cool article that shows you how to create a fairly generic markup system to turn text into marked up HTML based on keyword information stored in XML... cool stuff; […]

From: Erica Wiechers […]

The VS team has produced a 'preview' version of a new plug-in... […]

It has been one of those days... so much content being worked on, almost none of it visible on MSDN yet... but it is coming! […]

I've been working on the business and data layers for a web system and, as you might expect, I've been making quite a bit of use of ASP.NET's caching system. Now, to test the business layer, I had gone ahead and set up a non-ASP.NET caching system as well using my standard method for caching in […]

I put Chris Sells's most recent article onto the C# home page today, which meant we needed a 'feature' graphic... luckily we have another Chris on staff who handles our graphic needs (Chris Mowrer) and he whipped something up. […]

Kent recently wrote an ASP.NET control (ascx) to display the contents of an RSS feed onto a web page (for use on MSDN) so I decided to slap it on my own web site to display blogs entries at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/blog/default.aspx, and I think it looks pretty good!   […]

You probably already subscribe to the MSDN RSS feeds, so this might be a duplication but here goes; […]

Back in June I published a column showing you how to make a simple Pocket PC remote for Windows Media player. I didn't know it at the time, but some of my readers have sent in links to a professional version of the same idea. Built using the .NET Framework 1.1 and C#, Zerama looks amazing... everyth […]